A few weeks ago, I went on a tech scouting trip to South Africa to better understand the developer and entrepreneur environment. Over three days, I found the ideal platforms for my investigation - SeedCamp and Tech4Africa. As a mentor and participant, I was afforded the valuable opportunity to dive into an array of promising start-ups, I also got acquainted with some of South Africa’s front-running developers who are organizing Android hackathons, leading search engine marketing companies, creating asset-tracking systems with maps, and taking advantage of open source web tools.

Somewhat to my surprise, the hot topics at both events echoed the challenges and opportunities facing the rest of sub-Saharan Africa: the exponential rise of mobile, the demand for local content, the lack of a ubiquitous form of payment, the constraints of bandwidth, the desire to export technology, and the will to innovate locally. Our Google Africa team strongly believes that the solutions to these issues will be solved by the tech communities in Africa.

Our G-Africa initiative is aimed at putting the tools to solve local and global needs into the right hands. We are dedicated to empowering tech communities to build game-changing applications and businesses to harness the endless opportunities within reach.

With that in mind, we would like to an extend an invitation to CS students, developers and entrepreneurs to G-South Africa happening November 8th and 9th in Cape Town. Some of Google’s best and most engaging engineers, product managers, business managers and leadership will be speaking about Google’s open web and mobile technologies, so we hope to see you there. For more information and to register, check out the G-South Africa website.